Lofty matters

There are three floors in our block of flats, and we live on the top floor. Being at the top, and being a rather quirky sort of building, our flat is more like a house with stairs up to a split level landing, and sloping roof windows. It also has a loft.

A couple of months ago when J was working away from home, I came home late at night to discover the loft door was ajar. It is usually kept shut, and is opened only by sliding it across – it doesn’t drop down. Boy did it freak me out! The problem with imagination is that it conjures up lots of ‘worst case scenarios’ and mine were roughly on a par with a weirdo living in my loft.

I shone a torch through the gap and saw nothing (I was feeling very brave at this point), attempted to close it (couldn’t) and then decided since nothing in the flat had been touched, that it was best to ignore it. My way of ignoring it was to settle on the downstairs settee for the night so I could keep a beady eye on the ceiling – not the most restful of nights.

J came home the next day and had a good look around the loft and said all was well, no weirdo’s in the corner. He suggested it must have been the wind, as we’d had the windows open, and the wind no doubt slid the door across. Fair enough…

Then, a few days ago, J is away and I come home from work to the exact same thing – the loft door is once again open a few inches. I can totally believe it is the wind, as the windows were open – but why does it only happen when J is away? Why has it never happened all the months I have been working from home? And I do have windows open when I am working (if it is hot enough!) and that pesky loft door has remained shut.

I am off to town to buy a lock…

So it starts again…

I’ve done it! A whole six weeks (yup - count them!) in an office with people and printers and sweets and spreadsheets and meetings and marbles (actually no marbles – that was just to keep you on your toes). It was great fun to be this efficient office lass with her pashmina for a while but oh the relief of going back to being me – back to being creative, back with my writing and books, back in my flat, back to my story.

The budget has now been shored up with sticks, and I have a month or two clear to get my red pen busy with editing. I have also successfully pitched an idea to a London magazine that I cannot wait to get cracking on (quirky London history is my forte!), and in the near dim and distant future will be editing a factual book that should test my subbing skills. Bring it on, is what I say! Oh yes.

I got talking to a children’s book author the other day (as you do) and gave him one of my children’s book ideas to see what he thought. It was really interesting advice (basically keep working on it, try and develop a ‘voice’, think whether a publisher can see more than one story in you) but it was what he said about the illustrations that really struck home. I had experimented with a new style for two of them, and one he liked, and the other he didn’t, and he pointed out the bits in the picture that didn’t work for him. I instantly saw where I had gone wrong – I had run out of steam, and had finished it hurriedly, instead of really working on it. This worries me slightly, as I knew that with that particular drawing, yet I still showed it to him, and presented it as ‘finished’ when in reality, it needed more time. I’m not altogether sure with these children’s books of mine – they were something I did at University and I think they need ‘a lot’ of work to get them up to scratch – the picture book market is very, very tough. Something to pop on the back burner, maybe…

In the meantime the flat is a tip. Me and J have been scudding in and out of the flat like clouds across the sky over the last few weeks and the result is little pockets of mess everywhere I look. So it appears my first job will be a spring clean, followed by a scrub – and that is just me! My hair is starting to look like an unravelled brillo pad, it has been so long since I last had it cut. So I have decided tomorrow is to be a day of treats – new hair, new clothes, new shoes (well, why the devil not!) and then I can really settle down. I have a bundle of old newspapers dating back to the 1700’s to work my way through – friend C’s mum and dad have a house that is part home / part amazing museum. They let me borrow a suitcase full of old treasure… erm, newspapers, to see if there are any from 1940's etc to help the book, but apparently they go back even further than that, something that keeps the historian in me very happy indeed. I have also been collecting old books on different decades from various charity shops – oh yes, my home library is alive and thriving. J is thrilled, I tell you. Thrilled.

Let editing commence!

I headed out on Friday to buy four A4 folders from WHSmiths, imagining the print-out of the novel nicely nestled inside, and giving them to friends in what I hope will be a ‘nice gift/please read and feedback’ double edged sword. Then Saturday I headed out again, as the black ink cartridge had died mid-print. Finally I had one completed print-out, but I had to wrestle with my ‘7-page at a time’ hole punch, and then – yes, success.

Except…

There are too many pages for the folder to shut properly. In fact, it doesn’t shut at all. Darn it… This is probably because I have chosen the font Garamond, and point size 14. It sounds huge but Garamond is a serif type-face so needs to be slightly bigger, and besides, it looks good! Yet perhaps I should stick with something like Ariel, nice and easy on the eyes. Or Courier, and pretend I typed it all old-school on a typewriter. What font do editors like, anyway? Readable, I'd imagine goes down a treat. But then again, so does being able to turn the pages…

I have started editing in the other room, and it is slow going, I keep coming across passages that I am sure could be handled better, but my brain can only see the words I have written previously and refuses to accept anything new. And then there is editing for editing’s sake which is a bad habit to get into, and then thankfully there is the spotting of superfluous sentences that can be whipped out nice and painlessly and the novel sighs with relief.

Blimey, I have to say this spare room where I have the computer is FREEZING! It is the side of the flat that gets no sun, there is a heater but you'd be hard pressed to get a dribble of warmth from it and soon I shall see my breath hang before me in the air. If only I had a laptop! We got stung with a huge electricity bill recently, and I am sure it is connected to me hugging heaters during the day, so now I am scared to turn them on and have instead taken to wearing all my clothes at once. This does not do wonders for the morale or ego.

But – I return to the working world tomorrow! Yes… back to the commute, back to getting on the train by 7.30am and back to stress – woohoo! Actually this job is like a superhero racing in to save the heroine from a burning building, it has come literally in the nick of time for the overdraft, so for that its praises shall be sang from the rooftops. It’s only a month contract for now, and I’ll still get time to edit around it, at least that is the hope. I’m a bit blooming nervous about working in an office again though, and more than a bit nervous about the role I'll be doing. Ah well - only a month, real people to interact with, and a nice pay check at the end can't be bad.